Today's Column

"That" Is Me

Introduction: The Radical Surmise
I should introduce this thesis with the statement that my intention in pursuing my studies at Goddard is to enhance my qualifications to begin the practice of psychotherapy. My focus in this work has been what is known as Transpersonal Psychology, and as I’ve been doing for three semesters now, I go on herein with my notion that, for therapy to succeed, it must be based, consciously or unconsciously, in the idea that what really brings people into the consulting room is the pain of separateness and the quest for wholeness. This is vintage transpersonal psychology, of course, so what is my contribution? My little drop of water for this huge, leaky bucket we keep trying to fill is to add my assurance that the separation we feel is actually illusory, and most importantly, to advance the notion that things are, in some sense, arranged to appear this way.

The above is the beginning of my senior study for my Bachelor’s Degree at Goddard College. It was submitted and my degree was granted in August 2001. Most of what I want to talk about now was already contained in what I was saying then, but some of the ideas have taken eight more years to reach the point where they can be laid out in a way that makes them more accessible. What remains the same, always already there, is…

The Radical Surmise

The thing I want to “take back” is the word arranged. It’s unproductive and confusing to suggest that there is a plan involved. Awareness has no agenda. It’s not personal. If the mind wants to continue playing the game of separateness, then awareness is still there, unchanging. If the mind begins to realize separateness doesn’t add up, then awareness is still there, still unchanging. It doesn’t say anything. It’s just there, always already there, unchanging.

A lot of things have happened since my graduation but the single one that has made the most difference in my life is meeting Byron Katie. Katie lives what the ancient Indian sages called advaita. She doesn’t use any fancy terminology. None at all, in fact, or any metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Katie offers a tool called The Work, which consists of four questions and a turnaround. In June of 2006 I went to a three-day session with her at Kripalu Yoga Center in Massachusetts. By the second evening, I realized I was with someone whose consciousness is fully grounded in the Oneness that seekers spend their lives searching for.

We all talked for hours about the crazy way that our beliefs mislead us and the cardinal question of why, if we are all one, we act the way we do. Katie’s answer? We just do. It’s simply the way that brains work. At the beginning. But there are other ways. Katie doesn’t say that the way she teaches is better or that her way is good and the way our brains usually work is bad. It’s just different. It’s an opportunity to see and live and function as if one were already just as grounded as she is. The secret, that everyone knows and no one believes, is that we are all awake and aware. But we keep insisting we won’t be.

People start looking for spiritual answers when the physical answers they’ve been working with stop working. They go to therapists, ministers, priests, rabbis, Zen centers, some go to India, and some find someone in the lineage of Ramana Maharishi, or someone else who either explicitly or implicitly is teaching advaita. All of the teachings of advaita can be summed up in two phrases. The word advaita simply means “not two.” Another way to say this is that separation is an illusion. There’s nobody here but us chickens. The other phrase is one that everyone who’s ever been on the spiritual path hascertainly heard. Thou art That. The Sanskrit is usually rendered as Tat Tvam Asi, and can be transliterated in many different ways. I Am That is another. My current favorite is “That” is Me!”

Main Street religion, both East and West, tends to bog down in the simplistic notion that the world is a mess because of ignorance, evil, or both. Advaita contends that there is no such separation. It requires no practices, no meditations, no strange postures or diets, no refraining from ordinary life or the idiosyncratic enjoyments of our sexuality. There is no separation. When we act as if there is we fail to fulfill the joyous and powerful destiny that is our birthright. When we notice what ego is innocently doing, we suddenly have new choices and beauty blossoms as the foundation of all our acts.

Oneness is ever present. To search for it is absurd, like going to the station and standing on the platform waiting for a train that you are already traveling on. Every problem you have is another ramification of separateness and separateness isn’t the case. The more upset you become, the more frantically you want this and want that, the more sharply the mechanism operates that turns everything inside out, like a reflection in a mirror.

A little more than 10 years ago, I cut away the roots of a lifetime of depression, simply by realizing that it was something I was doing, not some disease I had caught or inherited. What comes now is the realization that acting as if I am a separate being is also something I am doing, and just as innocently as I was depressing myself. Depression is something the mind does when it cannot answer the question to be or not to be. Separation is another kind of depression. The mind is a physical mechanism with millions of years of evolution, telling it to take care of itself first. Awareness looks out from within, with no agenda. Again, if the mind wants to continue playing the game of separateness, then awareness is still there, unchanging.

If the mind begins to realize separateness is not the case, then awareness is still there, still unchanging, and that same mind can begin to realize the complete absurdity of seeking. Falling back into the arms of this unexplainable mystery we continue to try to describe the indescribable, just so we can somehow suggest what we can’t explain. The only way to hear silence is to shut up. If you stop scratching around, desperately searching for peace, really just STOP, what happens?

Tat Tvam Asi.

Today's Column

That Which Is

That which is cannot be personal, if personal means separate, different from me, or from you. That which is has no boundaries. There are no actions, no events, no time. All is now. Nothing has "happened." All is happening -- or, if you wish, is still happening -- now. Nothing Ever Stops.

The effort of the ego to change "the past" is inevitable: it is separation. And it is what THAT is doing. It only ends when THAT (re)opens completely to itself, which is what enlightenment is. This could be described as the process whereby THAT journeys "backward in time" to the point in personal memory where it dis-integrated, and re-integrates itself. Once this process gains momentum, then "you" are no longer going to sleep but "awakening."

You are that which moves the worlds – but not by volition. There is no "volition." There is only nature, ever changing, moving the worlds. Thou Art That. Your "thoughts" are the tracks of a process, not the beginning. They are the results of action, not the initiator. We cannot discern how thoughts produce actions because they don't: they trail behind. Action is beginningless. It is the nature of things. There is no "mover," only movement, which David Bohm called "the holomovement."

It dances. Shiva Nam Hridayam.

I am the Ancient
One,
divided,
I seek Myself.

Today's Column

The Singular One

I am the singular One, which arises in all things. That very arising is the root of separation. The singular One is changeless. Time and space are a dance, which is the genesis of “things.” Dancing is changing. Changing is separation, or the appearance of separation, but there is no separation. Things are dyads, pairs of that which moves and that which moves it. Such "pairs," are Not-Two.

To move is to appear to be separate. That which appears to be separate is joined at the heart, and it is only the appearance of division between the spontaneous movement of the body and the spontaneous resistance of the ego – the part of the mind whose nature is to seek to control – that creates the illusion of separateness.

As the mind is immersed in the arising, the appearance of separation strengthens. As the mind is seduced by the remembrance of the One, that veil begins to thin. Minds that have seen influence minds that are still convinced of their own lonely singularity, and that which shines from every eye knows itself.

Thou Art That.

Today's Column

The Hard Argument

Non-duality rests on what is perhaps the single hardest point to argue in all of existence: that the arguer, him or her self, does not exist. Who, then, is making the argument? Who is writing this? The simple answer is that the brain does it by itself, with no “agent” necessary behind the scenes, anymore than there is actually any “it” behind the statement, “It is raining.” Philosophical approaches to this dilemma trot out seemingly counterintuitive perspectives, like the notion that there is an implicit “I” common to all observers, each of which becomes, by virtue of its manifestation in the world, an explicit “I.” The brain it seems, which is regularly enslaved by its notions of ego, is also quite capable of encompassing the idea that its deepest nature is grounded in the very fabric of reality, and that it looks both out of and into every eye.

There is a natural rhythm of enrapturement with the everyday that arises at birth and gradually loses its all encompassing grip as its limitations become apparent. This brain that glories in its own selfishness is also capable of the most amazing acts of kindness and charity. It is capable of letting go with just as much grace as it is capable of holding on. This is when doors are discovered to be standing open that weren’t even recognized as doors before. Once the notion that this dictatorial “I” is a phantom gains the slightest credibility the ego’s demands begin to collapse. In this moment no harm can come to me. There is no threat for which I must build defenses, and every “should” that has nibbled at my peace of mind turns transparent and melts away. For every demand that appears an equal and opposite surrender occurs automatically, and it becomes inescapably obvious that the petty little judgments we make are simply the reactivity of a mechanism built into the brain by billions of years of evolution.

This reactivity is the neurological medium of the game of hide and seek that the Real plays with Itself, always teasing the seeker, making life “difficult.” This prolongs the delight of watching oneself espouse the “ideals” of non-duality and twist in the wind over quirks of acquisitiveness or eccentricities of sexuality. It’s all so simple. The mind is the battlefield, but the battle is a play. The one who is refusing to give up that last little selfishness is that same One, that is not-two. This is it.

Namasté

Today's Column

Sex & Spirit (Not Two)

It’s always such a breath of fresh air how truth is stranger than fiction: life gives you surprises you could never dream up in a million years. Back in the 1990s I wrote what I’ve referred to as an adult fantasy, a sort of swords and sorcerers novella, with some rather explicit sexual content. I was always a little embarrassed by it, and even after I revised it about two years ago – and got a new crop of rejection slips – I was careful who I showed the manuscript to. After all, I’m telling people I’m a “spiritual” person, right?

And now that I’m giving satsang the situation is even pricklier than it was before. Will people pay attention to the help I can give if they know I wrote this sexy story? A close friend of mine sent me an e-mail today, and it really touched me deeply. The universe actually is a friendly place, which is why Rumi always speaks of the Beloved, I guess. No names, but here’s what he said…

“Jim! I was just thinking of you and your writing… I was looking at some romance novels and remembered your own story of a man thrust into another world. I told you this before, but I gotta’ say, you have a talent for the sexually intense. I think I even got a hard-on reading your stuff, and I hope you take this as a compliment. I'm not talking porn, I'm talking of sexuality/spirituality. I think the surface was only scratched there.

“For some reason, people like to keep that under their hats, and their hats always on their heads, maybe because sexual fiction is too powerful. Maybe we should just move to France.”

Thanks to my good friend for his forthrightness, his courage, and his manliness, to tell me his deep, risky feelings. It’s so empowering. It encourages and emboldens me to remind the people who come to my satsang that awakening isn’t some bloodless retreat into a mountain cave or monasticism. As Jack Kornfield says, “First the Ecstasy, Then The Laundry.” I would add, “… and the toilet, and the Internet, and the bedroom.”

Wake up, move on, have feelings. It isn’t about some unending bliss, and it isn’t about becoming a saint. It’s about being everything you are, and then being everything. Everything. This is it, right now.

Today's Column

Undivided

One of the things that became clear through working with Byron Katie was that I had turned away from myself at a very early age, and that it was me who did it. No one else did it to me. It was my decision to go along with the idea that the natural way my being was blossoming into the world was wrong and had to be changed. This went on to approximately the age of 57, and then it changed. What occurs to this mind now is the curious resemblance between this process, which is the root of all depression, and the reflexive and spontaneous way of the Undivided in becoming the world.
The indivisible from which all things issue is the template of all the dynamics of human life and the human soul, which, by the way, is no different than any “other kind” of soul. Soul, of course, like every other word, is inadequate to describe what we’re trying to talk about, but we have to use something, and soul is the word so many of use to try to point to whatever it is that exceeds the boundaries of our individual lives and concerns.

So let’s try. What I am, what you are, what everything is, is the light hiding from itself. We call that the dark, and run away from it, try to eradicate it, but it’s nothing other than the light, hiding from itself, because that’s what it does. I hid from myself for the first five decades of my life, and that is the light hiding from itself. Why? Because it does. That’s how the world gets made.

So how can we change that? Hmm. We can’t. We can’t stop hiding, because we didn’t, in the fullness of this metaphor, ever start. It starts by itself. It stops by itself. Awareness begins to see what’s been going on, and the hidden memory of what went before simply emerges again. What has been wrapped so tightly in itself begins to unravel, and it’s all spontaneous. There’s nothing we can do to hurry it, or to hold it back. It isn’t about effort or determination, or purity. The pretence finally drops. The burden exceeds the capacity to carry it. The scales fall from our eyes, and we see that the sun has been out all the time, and then – oh, my! I Am That!

Today's Column

Satsang Sunday

This coming Sunday, March 1, I will be giving satsang, at my house in Vermont, from 1 to 3. This is the first time I’ve ever done this, and I’m sure there’ll be rough spots. Maybe no one will come. Maybe there’ll be a mob! No one has told me to do this, or told me I’m ready, and I’ve asked myself why I’m doing it. Well, aside from the non-duality outlook – that nobody’s “doing” anything – I’m doing it because some one did it for me.

Byron Katie is my teacher, and she says the same thing that all teachers do: that it’s not about her, and that the way that realization came to her isn’t important. I’d say that too, except for one thing. I think that people who have awakening blossom around them are vulnerable to forgetting that they are the evidence that it’s real. What I can say, for anyone who wants to hear, is, “Yes. It is real. It’s here. Now.”

We are our stories, weaving in and out and on and on. What’s left of that if we open our attention into this moment, this immeasurable presence? There is no time in the Real, no space. Just this, and Thou Art This.